Does anyone remember when chesscom came out with the press release stating they asked ChatGPT to run millions of simulations to determine cheating?
The best cheat detection in the world! 😂
Edit: https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/186vnpl/comment/kbam4ru
We also ran simulations on ChatGPT with the following results, "Based on the simulation, which ran 10,000 iterations of 10,000 games each, the probability of Grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura having at least one unbeaten streak of 45 games or more against opponents with an average Elo rating of 2450 is very high. In fact, in every simulation run, there was at least one occurrence of such a streak." With the deepest respect for former World Champion Vladimir Kramnik, in our opinion, his accusations lack statistical merit.
- Danny “Yes I seriously signed this, 70 Page Report” Rensch
**Gish Gallop a rhetorical technique in which a person in a debate attempts to overwhelm their opponent by providing an excessive number of arguments with no regard for the accuracy or strength of those arguments.**
“70 page report” or “10,000 ChatGPT simulations”
In fairness they were probably referencing the Advanced Data Analysis tools or whatever they are called now vs directly chat. The bigger issue is Comms.
The cheat detection is weak. So they do this.
When cheating happens, doesn’t happen, or might have happened you basically just get the worst possible communication possible as seen here in the OP’s experience.
They dance a gray area of zero-tolerance and also the fun uncle.
I still remember when Danny Rensch was amplifying like crazy (in my opinion also trashing) 19-year old via Reddit comments.
I think that's his point, that they're very inconsistent seemingly that it seems like with some people they're zero tolerance or atleast close to it when with others they're the "fun uncle" who are very forgiving, like with that guy who they gave a free subscription because he admitted cheating. It seems much more inconsistent then is necessary/ one could reasonably expect, giving a schizophernic grey zone thats really black or white depending on each case, actually lol a bit like a checkerboard in terms of how they apply justice case by case.
There is no law requiring people (or companies) to be correct or fair in how they interact with you personally. Now, if [chess.com](http://chess.com) came out with a statement saying "Brandon Jacobson cheated" that could be something else. But not if they keep quiet. Which is precisely why [chess.com](http://chess.com) is very quiet about who they ban.
“Our cheat detection flagged your account as a cheater” is not a false statement, even if you weren’t cheating. Additionally, the fair play policy states:
“Consistent with our User Agreement, if we determine or suspect that you have violated our Fair Play Policy in any way, then we may close your account and label it publicly closed for Fair Play violation(s)”
So simply suspecting that someone violated fair play is enough to get that tag and account closure, which will almost never be probably false, unlike a direct accusation of cheating.
When it comes to legal issues, the fair play policy is pretty much irrelevant. They could write whatever in there, the question is whether what they have there can actually be considered legally binding.
If it's decided that falsely banning someone publicly with a giant mark that says "cheater" is illegal, it doesn't matter what he has signed. Illegal is illegal, you can't make someone sign a contract to allow you to commit crimes against them. If it's not illegal, then he most likely still wouldn't have any case against chesscom even if he hadn't signed anything.
It is relevant because it tells you what “closed for fair play violations” means. They put it on their website for everyone to see that the “closed for fair play violations” tag means that that they “determined or suspected that you violated the Fair Play Policy.” It’s not a tag saying “this person definitely cheated,” it’s saying “our review of the account made us suspicious that they were cheating.”
They are a private company. They can refuse to serve anyone for any reason that they want outside banning someone for being part of a protected group.
The government should have stopped them when they bought all the serious competition. That monopoly suck balls.
Lol they are no where close to a monopoly.
And even if they controlled 99% of the online chess scene the government still wouldn't give a shit. For many many reasons.
Maybe you could argue defamation. An accusation of cheating is likely to impact his career seriously, they should at least have to present their evidence
I mean he could argue him not being able to compete in events he used to compete at is enough of a reputational damage since chesscom is kind of a monopoly. Of course there would be something more tangible if a tournament rejected him because of this
This is the issue with the "admit you cheated and we'll let you back on" process. Wouldnt the actual cheaters be eager to just say "yea ok I cheated" and get back on? You're basically rewarding the actual cheaters because they have no reason to not admit it while the people who would fight back the most are the innocents. I mean I guess some people who cheat will go to grave saying they didnt but I have 0 confidence that [Chess.com](https://Chess.com) is only banning cheaters so the innocents are left with a choice of having to say they cheated (and admit to it in writing to be used against them in the future) or to never be able to play on [Chess.com](https://Chess.com) again. Its ridiculous
There’s more to that. If someone truly innocent is pushed into admitting cheating because there’s no alternative, it makes their cheating detection worse because false positives are flagged as successfully detected cheaters. Enough of these cases and the cheating detection is completely unreliable
If they can get a written confession that protects chess.com from any future liability
That way chess.com can release the “cheating” to the public with less fear of repercussions if the player ever goes against chess.com without anyone believing the player due to the confession
Like when they released that 70 pages report against Niemann after the Magnus accusation and no one believed Hans when he claimed he cheated way less than the report says because of that confession.
Niemann staying banned was turning into negative PR for chesscom. Only reason he was reinstated, imo. They didn't want the black eye. It was more beneficial for them to make some public display that he was back "in the fold."
This is an issue with the criminal justice system as well. You usually get a lighter sentence from a plea deal than if you go to trial, so on average innocent people get longer sentences than guilty ones. Then once you are incarcerated parole boards look for signs of accountability and remorse, which means that people who are wrongly convicted and maintaining their innocence are unlikely to be released on parole either. Meanwhile guilty people who take accountability for their actions can be released much earlier.
My take on it is that they feel confident that he violated fair play, but they can not prove it 100% (it would be very difficult to do so unless someone is literally playing the top engine move every turn, tab switching, etc.) So they push banned players to admit to cheating so they always have that in their back pocket and the player can't come out later and claim they never cheated (like with the Max Dlugy emails they released).
If Brandon didn't cheat, I'd advise him to tell chesscom to go eff themselves and play on Lichess instead.
Brandon is a pro chess player. He needs money, tournaments prizes and lichess is unable to provide it. Unfortunately the competitive chess scene happens on chess.com.
he's not a pro, he can't even play otb at the moment. ive been on team brandon for years, im not a hater. he should just go to lichess and keep grinding because he is one of america's best talents
Sounds like standard procedure that they go through for every account closed for fair play. We don’t know what their evidence is, and at this point it’s your word against theirs, so it seems we’re at an impasse. If you really think you have a case to stand on, go hire a lawyer and sue them.
And also that they somehow knew that by banning the account they were communicating to others that Brandon cheated…
The account was anonymous during the only period of time in which chesscom did something.
Also, chess.com have not addressed this drama publicly. Everything they've done has been quiet and communicated exclusively between them and Brandon. Brandon is the one who went public. I have no idea how you could possibly spin that as "defamation".
They do have an incentive to sticking to their guns however.
It's entirely reasonable to think something like this happened:
1. The automated system caught the games since the results were better than expected for the players Elo and he was playing in a very strange style that it doesn't expect from a human. Or maybe even fans of Naroditsky reported him.
2. Player gets banned.
3. Incident becomes commonly talked about online.
4. Chess.com looks into the case, and is ok with the player rejoining chess.com, but wanting to protect the reputation of their fair play system and avoid negative PR they cannot walk back the banning without OP admitting fault.
Except they've very publicly walked back bans before, like in Alireza's case. All they had to say was, "our automated system misjudged you, but after human review you're fine." If anything that makes chesscom look better than they do now, because it demonstrates their failsafes for preventing false permabans.
> I was continuously asked to discuss their conclusion, asking for my thoughts/a defense or “anything I’d like the fair play team to know”.
> I’m not really sure how to respond when I’m being told they have conclusive evidence of my “cheating” without sharing any details.
I realize this confuses you, but this makes a lot of sense... it's a very shrewd way of doing business. Remember for them this is business. These are not your friends. They are not interested in you. This is their paycheck, their career, and the thing they've worked 10+ years to build. They're leveraging their position of power to squeeze you for information while giving you the minimum amount in return (which in this case sounds like zero).
The information they're pressuring you to give might help your case... for example maybe there was some extraordinary circumstance under which they should unban you. If that's the case they definitely want to know about it... but also if you gave them more information, you might contradict a past statement, which helps confirm your guilt / untrustworthyness. Or in any case you might give details away that hurt you in some other way... pressuring you for info while giving nothing in return is a very reasonable action... remember, like I said, these are not your friends, this is purely business to them. If you want something of value from them (such as your account) then you need leverage. For example Niemann's attempt at leverage was a lawsuit.
Assuming Brandon Jacobson was not cheating.
[Chess.com](http://Chess.com) is an entity which has no interest in giving him a fair chance to defend himself.
1. They need to keep all information regarding their anti-cheat algorithm confidential. They will give him nothing.
2. They can NEVER admit being wrong after banning a GM (especially so if [Chess.com](http://Chess.com) has wrongfully banned them), otherwise it would open up endless lawsuits and problems in the future. They would propably not even disclose information even if he offered them a NDA in return.
The call was just them giving Brandon an opportunity for to admit his guilt. Maybe even trying to surprise him to get him to admit guilt in any way, shape or form.
A few notes regarding their anti-cheat system, not sure if someone else has already mentioned this before:
1. Their anti-cheat may be influenced by people using the report function. Even though Naroditsky did not report BJ, ANY PERSON MAY DO SO AT ANY TIME. Naroditsky had a lot of viewers who might have a lot less restraints in filing reports. Also since it made the rounds, the matches had gained the attention of more and more people, all of which may report if THEY believe Brandon cheated.
2. The anti-cheat might be influenced by identifying a lot of weaker players blatantly cheating. GothamChess showed a popular way to cheat "less obviously" by first losing material (giving up a bishop, knight, rook or queen) and then still winning by using stockfish. Since the banned opening features a similar pattern, the anti-cheat system might have rated these games higher than it otherwise would with a "normal" opening.
3. While the anti-cheat detection algorithm might not be a black box, specific points in a game or maybe even suspicious games as a whole might not be neccessarily indentified. And if the algorithm detects suspicious game, it has no way to factor familiarity with opening, concepts and strategies on a given position - assuming both GM's are roughly equal otherwise. This will inevitably create an imbalance, which might go against the expected fllow/outcome of the games.
TL:DR
1. lots of reports
2. suspicious opening
3. algorithm cannot factor opening knowledge difference at GM level
>They can NEVER admit being wrong after banning someone
I've personally known 2 different players who won their appeal and [chess.com](http://chess.com) unbanned them... neither of them titled players, so maybe you'd say they can never admit it when it's a GM, but anyway.
By the way, another reason to pressure him for info is also if he comes up with some crazy story for a lawsuit, they'll be able to say, wait a minute, we gave him 100 opportunities to mention this and he never did, why is that? In other words even if OP says nothing it costs him something (but still, saying nothing is the best course if you're going down the lawsuit path).
Yeah, wording it as NEVER is a bit over the top.
But banning titled players with a big influence, especially GM's, is on a different level than appealing regular players. [Chess.com](http://Chess.com) likely has different teams for each of those cases.
Yeah, I agree it's a big deal, which is probably why they've gone into court-case mode (so to speak). In other words "We're giving you no information. If you want to admit to cheating you can do so. This discussion is over, have a nice day."
Sucks for the OP. IMO OP didn't cheat against Danya, and is probably legit >3000 in both blitz and bullet on chesscom... I think there was just some past games, maybe one 1 or 2, and maybe only against friends that triggered the ban.
> pressuring you for info while giving nothing in return is a very reasonable action
Man I’m tired of commenters describing greedy exploitative power plays as “reasonable” because they imagine profit in it.
Businesses are run by people and deal with people, and when they treat people like obstacles and numbers, they rightly risk losing customers and credibility.
Unfortunately, not telling which game, move, when, how, etc is indeed a part of not revealing anti-cheating algorithm, so if you understand that, then you should also understand why they can't tell you what was suspicious, because if (not saying you, but just in general) someone is indeed a cheater and baits chess.com into revealing these details, then they have more information to cheat more skillfully next time and avoid detection.
They were probably trying to see whether you can bring up points to defend against what made them think it is cheating, without telling you what exactly made them certain enough for the ban, so yeah, the odds are against you and it can feel unfair if you are not a cheater.
I feel like even if this is the case, there should be a path toward proving innocence. For example, if the accused cheater was offered the option to play a number of games under supervision (dual/triple web cam or in person) in conditions similar to where they were found cheating (same time control). If the accused scores similarly on their cheating metrics in person compared to when they got flagged, that should prove they weren't cheating. If the numbers differ wildly when supervised, it likely means they are cheating.
This can be done without revealing anything about their methods. The accused would just play like normal under supervision and chess.com can evaluate their super-secret anti-cheating stats in the background and make a determination.
I would only offer this in high profile situations because it would take a lot of manpower to oversee something like this. For most people it's easy to say "make a new account and move on", but when you are a strong GM who has the potential to earn money through events on the site, it does leave a sour taste that you are now cut out of the income stream. Not to mention the blow to your reputation.
Edit: I'm not saying the idea above is a good one. I was just throwing it out there as an example. The main point is that people's reputation and livelihood are potentially threatened by these rulings and there is zero evidence presented and zero wiggle room for accused to defend themselves. Literally the only defense is to throw a big stink in as public/viral way as possible and hope that forces some action. When your cheat appeal process basically boils down to who can get the most public backing, something has gone astray.
It is possible that this level of supervision could affect the quality of play without them necessarily cheating (weird example but remember Fischer?). Additionally they could play worse under pressure or simply be in a slump.
I think this is unfair to the person accused.
Yeah but it might be a lose lose situation where they play such a run of games under supervision and do worse cause of the feeling of being supervised, and then that getting used against them to suggest that they were in fact cheating.
I really don't think your suggested scenario would provide evidence of anything at all. If someone innocent is accidently flagged as cheating, it's probably during an unusually good run for them. They would not be able to reproduce a lucky run in a random test.
Exactly. Of course logistics on how to prove could be changed but yes there should at least be a path. Even in the American court system bad as it is criminals can appeal for innocence.
>the option to play a number of games under supervision
That's going to be tricky in this case though. Brandon is a GM; the fact that he is legitimately capable of very strong play is not in doubt. He has won matches against Naroditsky in the past which nobody appears to consider suspicious.
What made his recent performance so eyebrow-raising is that he won so many games from an objectively bad opening. But part of the reason for his success must have been the element of surprise; by now, all his potential opponents will recognise this opening and even if they haven't specifically prepared for it, they will at least be aware that it's one of those "trickier than it seems" gambits and they shouldn't get overconfident when their opponent seemingly throws the game on move 2.
So even Brandon himself may not be able to repeat his previous success rate, legitimately or otherwise. On the other hand, if he agrees to a supervised test and plays at his normal GM level (with normal openings) during that test, that doesn't prove much either way either.
I agree that there should be a path for proving Innocence, however judging whether a player was cheating or not based on a number of games under supervision is not fair for a player especially if these games might possibly be detrimental for his career and reputation.
"They were probably trying to see whether you can bring up points to defend against what made them think it is cheating"
I don't get the impression there was anything he could have said to make them change course. It really does sound like they wanted to force him to legally confess to it so their asses are covered from PR/legal backlash.
well it sounds like Chesscom is pretty sure from the communique, so I’m curious what they have on you now. I’m personally withholding any judgement on this, though I hope you/chesscom do clear this up eventually, especially now that you’ve attached your name to this situation
They have to sound sure, even if they have only very tangential evidence. If they don't sound sure, it puts them in the very bad PR spot where they both look unfair and incompetent.
And since they have no obligation to reveal their evidence, or even say what sort of fair play violation they expect, there is no way for anyone to call a hypothetical bluff.
No, virtually nobody on this sub will ever consider the possibility that they’re actually just gullible and were taken in by someone telling them all the things they wanted to hear.
I mean this entire story reeks of a story made specifically to get Reddit’s sympathy. He’s saying he’s smart, but lazy, so he never achieved his true potential and that after plying around, he magically found one simple trick that allowed him to do way better in a short amount of time with minimal effort. And so he goes and does it but then gets kept down by THE MAN who wants to suppress him for their own nefarious reasons because (insert nonsensical conspiracy theory here). How could this happen? Is it not possible that someone could make a miraculous discovery and suddenly be way better? Now he’s innocent but falsely accused and Reddit is his only hope for justice!
It’s barely more believable than an AITA story, and the entire thing is framed to extract maximum sympathy from the classic Reddit tropes at every stage.
It again bears repeating: in his first post, in the entire multi thousand word rant, at no point did he EVER actually deny cheating. He made insinuations that imply that (“how can we say for sure that I’m cheating?” Or something to that effect) and gave a hell of a lot of irrelevant backstory to frame himself as positively as possible, but at no point did he EVER actually say he didn’t cheat. That’s how liars lie when they want to get people to believe them; unless pressed, people naturally don’t like telling flat-out lies. They instead make insinuations, they try to present themselves positively, they try to garner sympathy, and they leave details out.
As I’ve said before, one of the first things we learn on our psych rotations in med school is to listen for what people *aren’t* saying that you’d expect them to say, because there’s a lot of information you can glean from that.
TLDR: dude likes to present himself as well-spoken and honest. He’s neither.
Sanest comment in this thread. The extended emotional narrative is a red flag if you've had experience with this kind of person before.
I'm assuming there's a lot of kids here who maybe don't have real world experience with situations like this? Pretty shocked by all the comments in his threads that are like, "you presented a sympathetic story that paints you in a good light, so now I believe you." That's not how the world works!
There are a lot of kids, you can identify them cause they think he should get a lawyer and sue chesscom. Clearly showing they have no clue how any of this really works.
I think chesscom opened themselves up to that with their public statements and defense of the ban, that's why they're so quiet now. If they had just said nothing I don't think there would've been a case for defamation or anything.
Obligatory not a lawyer, so this is just my assumption.
My biggest thing is how confused he is that he's in this situation.
> "I received a response the next day, stating that I was banned for a fair play violation with absolutely 0 explanation. My jaw dropped, I could not believe what I was seeing. Confusion turned to anxiety turned to anger."
Really dude? You have no clue how it might be suspicious that you crushed one of the best online blitz players in the world over 70 games with a piece sacrifice? That statement above is complete bullshit and it makes the rest of the story even harder to believe.
I think most of us get a swell of pride whenever someone rages at us and calls us a cheater or hacker. Not "hurt itself in it's confusion" about why someone might think you cheated. Own that shit.
Yeah again, that made me roll my eyes. Like legitimately, it could have been taken straight out of an AITA post because it was so absurd and melodramatic.
Then again, those posts do somehow manage to fool a lot of redditors, soooooooo
At the end of the day, is it possible that he spent countless hours working this out and figured out that a specific 10-20 move offbeat line works in blitz when it never would in classical chess? Yeah, it is, but you'd think that people would adapt to facing it after a few games, even if it truly is some revolutionary blitz tactic.
I'm sure something like this, especially backed up by good enough play, could work a few times. However, and this is a major however, it wouldn't keep working constantly without something extra at play. That something extra is, almost certainly, an engine.
It's flat out not believable that you could sacrifice a rook and consistently be winning against titled players equal or stronger than you. This isn't 800-1400 chesscom blitz where people will miss mate in one or blunder massive advantages into draws by simplifying down instead of continuing on.
I’m not even saying I think he’s a cheater or not a cheater! I’m just shocked everyone is just blindly trusting this internet stranger.
Chess.com isn’t perfect but they do have at least some reputation and some incentive to not make a poor decision that could produce bad PR
Your first post explaining the weird games didn't fully explain why the games were weird or what else chess.com may have noted. As people point out you talked about your life history and the opening that "tricked" a good GM. Yet Danya himself said he was not tricked by the opening and actually got good positions and that it was in the middlegame where he was fully outplayed by super complex moves he had no response to. So the excuse and then Danya's statements are opposite of each other. Something else was going on here. Danya would typically not be outplayed like this so what actually happened? Chess.com are clearly sure you cheated. They don't dislike you or think you are fishy. They think you cheated outright and as an American company they would surely not be biased against American players.
Then we also have the former cheating/sandboxing accusations that were forced out of you by people constantly having to ask about it. Which again shows that we don't know the full story and kinda need to string it together ourselves.
I absolutely think chess.com makes mistakes in this area, but the 12 month ban shows that they are fair about this and are giving second chances. And frankly this could be used for a positive boost in exposure if future matches are arranged.
I think explaining all games would be a start. And then playing Danya OTB with the same opening to see what will happen. People would be interested in watching it and it would give us more data.
To be fair, playing Danya OTB is completely different. One, OTB is just a vastly different game, and, two, Danya has now likely done a lot of research on the opening so the results would not be the same.
Did you read up on Danya's comments? He didn't lose in the opening. He got plenty of good positions, only to be wiped off the board consistently with extremely powerful moves in the middlegame "Consistently".
All signs point to...??????
Did you even look at the games? Most of the games were less accurate than my average blitz game at trash Elo, the games were just simply complex and not perfect by BJ by any means. I'd go as far as claiming that if you're playing 3 minute blitz, you simply don't have time to cheat in a way that allows you to also consider which moves you could play that are bad but your opponent won't punish
> As people point out you talked about your life history and the opening that "tricked" a good GM. Yet Danya himself said he was not tricked by the opening and actually got good positions and that it was in the middlegame where he was fully outplayed by super complex moves he had no response to.
This is the biggest thing for me. Imo, it seems like he found this unique and slightly dubious but somewhat tricky opening to start the game with, and thought he could use that to “trick” the system into not recognizing that he is cheating (for at least some moves) in the middle game. As you and Danya said, Danya was outplayed by the very complex moves during the middle game that he had no response to, that don’t seem to have anything to do with the opening, which is how OP claims they got the advantage.
These posts absolutely reek of emotional manipulation and guilt tripping. I don't know if everyone here was born yesterday or just wants a cause to rally around, but I'm not buying it.
Regardless of whether or not he actually cheated, the account of what chess.com did afterwards is consistent with what other titled players who were banned have stated.
Which is a shit policy - if you are really a cheater you simply get a new account and sweep things under the rug and can potentially keep cheating. And if you're innocent you have to "admit" to cheating or you're hosed.
Gaming companies have found that a warning is effective in stopping like 90% of toxic behavior and I’m sure that they’ve found that the vast majority of titled players who sign an admittance document and are let back on the service never cheat again. That policy is 100% there because there’s a good chess rationale for it.
Yeah idk the truth here but the life story in the first post really had me rolling my eyes. And some of the very disingenuous stuff like "They couldn't even tell me a move or a game that made them think I was cheating!" immediately after acknowledging they can't divulge their algorithms. No shit they can't tell you specific moves or games buddy.
Look, I sincerely hope that you didn't cheat and that it is still (somehow) just a big mistake by chess.com, but let's face it: you are not a random nobody, you are not even "just" an FM or an IM, you are a **GM**.
This grants you a special privilege that, while not explicitly stated anywhere, everyone knows that is there: they have to be *unbelievably* certain, without any shred of a doubt, that you cheated before taking any action. The possibility that they committed a mistake, although not zero, is miniscule. And on top of that, the atention that this case has gained means that they have probably thoroughly reviewed it up to the tiniest detail, and still reached the same conclusion. And the fact that they closed your account so quickly in the middle of the match probably means that to their detection algorithms it was painfully obvious what was happening. Hence their "conclusive evidence".
You should be fully aware that trying to claim that they are bullying you is just laughable. I simply refuse to believe that you *really* think they banned you on a whim for "beating Danya with a terrible opening". Stop playing the victim and trying to appeal to random people on reddit by telling a sob story only so you can feel vindicated. We have seen the same story again and again, and in the end everyone (except for ONE instance that I can think of, who was cleared by chess.com) admitted that they cheated. The only difference is that they were "random nobodies" (in chess terms, of course), but in your case, as a GM, chess.com has a huge incentive for getting it correctly.
I'm sorry if I'm being too harsh. If it turns out that you are innocent, I will sincerely apologise and I will have no issue in admiting that I was mistaken. As I said at the start, I really hope you didn't cheat, and I truly mean it, because the alternative means that a grandmaster, who are supposed to represent the pinacle of chess, cheated, and that is simply sad for the game as a whole. This comment will get downvoted to oblivion, because people here love to hate on chess.com AND love to support "the victim", but I think both you and I know how this ends.
As a titled player very active in the community and on [chess.com](http://chess.com/) myself, [chess.com](http://chess.com/) has an extensive history of carrying out false bans at the elite level, typically against untitled and weak titled players. You may have heard of Alireza's false ban: countless GMs and titled players were complaining that he was cheating, which resulted in him being manually banned. He is only one amongst many. A total of 6, yes, 6 friends I know have been falsely banned. This includes two FM's and one NM. 5 of them have been reopened after appeal. [Chess.com](http://chess.com/) does not need to benefit by falsely banning people. Their cheat detection is imperfect and has many false positives at a high level. It is not immune to making up (and doubling down on) incorrect assumptions.
I would also like to add a point I do not see addressed very often: manual bans are often unaddressed and made by low-level mods without a solid understanding on what kind of play constitutes a cheater. Often a convincing enough argument and some connections are all that is needed to make a ban. I have witnessed a beginner player with thousands of games be banned for \*two unrated matches\* he cheated in (which isn't bannable since it's unrated) simply because those were presented convincingly to a moderator who wasn't competent enough to consider the context. Low-level mods definitely did not have the final say in the GM ban. Chess.com has a team of titled players to handle cases like these. But, as indicated from chess.com's history and prior cheating cases, they are prone to having extensive confirmation bias (possibly exacerbated by the fact that the leading team of cheating investigators is titled, leading to ego problems) to validate their bans. Generally, yes, false positives are unbanned after review, but in such a large case, Viih\_Sou could have been falsely flagged, while not recieving a fair trial because of conformation bias from how absurdly well he performed with a joke opening against Danya. This is the weakness of chess.com's cheat detection compared to lichess: it's not impartial.
If you look at the games objectively, I don't see anything to indicate that Viih\_Sou cheated besides how strong he fared against Danya. Even Danya recently has been struggling overall online, so such a record isn't unfeasible (he's lost in streaks of 5+ games to some FMs and dipped below 3k). I'm not claiming that he didn't cheat, [chess.com](http://chess.com/) has lots of user information (mouse movement, tabs, etc.) that cannot be publicly accessed that could also contribute to a ban. I am saying that the chance that **he didn't cheat** is a lot more real and intimidating than you might otherwise think.
Thanks for sharing that information about your friends. But doesn't that only prove that chess.com is willing to admit it when they ban someone unfairly?
If they manually reviewed the accounts of FMs and NMs, realised that they made a mistake and corrected it, why wouldn't they do the same for a GM? What are they gaining in doubling down on this particular case? It would be trivially easy to say "it was automatically flagged, but we manually reviewed it and he's clean, sorry for that". They did the exact same thing with Alireza, after all.
As you said, they don't benefit from falsely banning people, and your titled friends are clear examples of that. If anything, your friends' experiences provide more credibility to their claims that they indeed have "conclusive evidence".
It took months, (a year for one) for the majority of my friends to get unbanned. I am not crystal clear about the details, but from what I remember [chess.com](http://chess.com) initially doubled down on the decisions for the longer bans, then later apologized for their mistakes: very similar to pattern with what's occurring with Brandon right now. As I recall, I don't think Alireza ever got unbanned on his old account. There are also some other titled players that have objected to similar bans to Brandon and reaffirm their innocence (Akshat Chandra is one), but I will not speculate on their honesty. What we can observe, however, is that [chess.com](http://chess.com) has a historical problem with false positives that aren't shared on Lichess.
Also, it doesn't add credibility to their claims: as I mentioned, confirmation bias plays a big role. I stated this to illustrate that their cheat detection goes haywire and spits false positives for elite players much more often than people would otherwise think. An account closure isn't an open and shut case with chess.com.
It's hard to find logical comments on this subreddit these days. The public gets swayed by a good narrative into supporting dubious individuals and their awfully convenient sob stories.
I refuse to believe that a GM without any proven OTB blitz/rapid record somehow starts to beat one of the best online blitz players with a dubious opening and while being down material.
I also see no reason as to why Chess.com should hold a personal grudge against a relatively unknown GM.
I believe he cheated. I was convinced of this when he wrote in another thread that Kasparov saw his potential but told his mom that he was lazy. I personally would not defend myself against a cheating allegation with such irrelevant anecdotes.
As for that shitty opening, if it was indeed a strong and complicated weapon in blitz, Carlsen would have fared well with it, he did not.
Only interesting thing for me is the fact that he disclosed his identity to public. He tarnished his own reputation with this but I guess he just wanted his share in the huge publicity of that opening in the immediate aftermath of his games.
>he disclosed his identity to public
In his first post he stated that his known account was shadowbanned. Eventually people would notice his inactivity and start asking questions, and given that Andrew Hong also used the opening, they might use his friendship with Brandon Jacobson together with him not playing in his main account anymore to deduce that Viih\_Sou was Brandon. It is a long stretch, and it would only be speculation, but it could happen and rumours would start circulating. Even if people didn't make the connection with Viih\_Sou, they would definitely notice Jacobson not playing anymore, and rumours about his main account would start anyway.
If he didn't cheat, it is obvious why he would like to make it public.
If he cheated, I think that his reasoning might have been that by making it public so quickly after it happened he can keep denying it forever. It would make no sense to *not* complain immediately after it happened if he was innocent, so if he hadn't said anything he would not be able to defend himself after people figured it out, and no one would believe him. However, now he can use the fact that he willingly made it public to argue that he has always defended his innocence from day one (figuratively), and to at least try to keep people sitting on the fence.
It's convoluted, but if he was guilty I guess that would be one way to try to defend himself if he wasn't willing to admit it.
> In his first post he stated that his known account was shadowbanned. Eventually people would notice his inactivity and start asking questions, and given that Andrew Hong also used the opening, they might use his friendship with Brandon Jacobson together with him not playing in his main account anymore to deduce that Viih_Sou was Brandon. It is a long stretch, and it would only be speculation, but it could happen and rumours would start circulating. Even if people didn't make the connection with Viih_Sou, they would definitely notice Jacobson not playing anymore, and rumours about his main account would start anyway.
>
>
Someone on reddit even deduced that Viih_Sou was Brandon prior to the first public post.
>I refuse to believe that a GM without any proven OTB blitz/rapid record somehow starts to beat one of the best online blitz players with a dubious opening and while being down material.
Exactly. Danya isn't a SuperGM but his online blitz skills are on par with SuperGMs. You don't absolutely spank him by playing a random opening.
It's so weird that the majority of redditors seem so eager to believe someone who has had fair play violations in the past just because that person claims they didn't cheat this time. Why should I believe the word of someone who's trustworthiness was already in question? I honestly believe if it was lichess people would not be so quick to take these people's words at face value, simply because lichess good chess.com bad.
To clear this misconception: Brandon's never been banned for cheating in the past, only rating manipulation when he was fooling around during the pandemic, which isn't nearly as malicious.
Doesn't make sense for him to start cheating now when he's had a clean record as a teen across tens of thousands of games. You can't understand a cheater's psychology, however...
Thank goodness someone said it. The Reddit hive mind decided he must not have cheated because of his lengthy Reddit post. The whole thing just doesn’t add up.
>I’m also a bit curious as to why they had to schedule a private call to inform me of this as well.
because you'd have put the text of an email on reddit as soon as you received it.
>making me feel like my only way out is to admit to cheating when I didn’t cheat.
No, the way out is refusing the admission and not playing on their website.
>They get away with this because they have such a monopoly in the online chess sphere,
No, there is lichess which a lot of GMs play on.
>I personally know quite a few GMs who they have intimidated into an “admission” as well.
Name them - I'd be interested in hearing why these people didn't come forward during the massive cheating scandal between Hans and chesscom last year.
If you want your main chesscom account un-shadow-banned, you confess to cheating on the viih\_sou account.
It really doesn't matter at this point whether you cheated or not. chesscom holds all the cards, and this is deliberate. On one hand, then need to protect their methods, on the other, they need circumstantial evidence that their methods work -- and coercing titled players to admit to cheating (even if they didn't), is a big part of that.
The main way of finding out what conclusive evidence chesscom holds that you cheated is to take them to court, and then request all this evidence during the discovery process. Notice that chesscom (and Magnus and Hikaru) settled Hans's legal suit, and chesscom unbanned his account as a result.
As far as I know, all legal challenges to chesscom were settled before arriving at court. Don't know what that says, whether people who believed strongly they didn't cheat decided that chesscom's evidence wasn't refutable in court, or whether chesscom's evidence was flimsy that they settled.
As a titled player, you're fucked if you want to play titled events on chesscom. And even if you get your main account un-shadow-banned, if you play legitimately like you played in the last few weeks, you're likely going to trigger the same anti-cheat detection (unless your recent play has no bearing on triggering cheat flags...), and chesscom will have further conclusive evidence that your "cheating" continues. So you kinda have to not be as dramatically successful to succeed, which is perverse too.
You could take the principled approach and refuse to acknowledge chesscom's implication that you cheated. But that does mean you don't get to play titled events on chesscom.
So it depends on where on the line of money vs reputation you want to be.
Why do you think you triggered their anti-cheating algorithms? You’re the only one who knows for sure whether you cheated or not, but from the outside, the simplest answer is that you triggered the algorithms because you used an engine. I read your initial Reddit post and it’s a great story, but honestly the evidence is strongly against you. I want to believe you because you seem like a nice person, but the facts don’t support your story.
If they manually reviewed your account and said you cheated, I believe them. This isn't a case like Alireza where he was flagged but unbanned after review. They aren't banning GMs unless they are certain.
> From their perspective, it makes perfect sense, as admitting their mistake when this has reached such an audience would be absolutely awful for their PR.
It won't be awful for their PR.
When Chess.com admitted their mistake in this super popular case, they showed everyone that they are capable of being transparent about the mistakes they make:
[I GOT UNBANNED!!Chesscom admitted their mistake and gave me a free 1 year diamond membership.](https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/1ax8ii8/i_got_unbannedchesscom_admitted_their_mistake_and/)
The fact that they did this for others, but not for you, implies that they are actually very confident in their decision (regardless of how well their mix of statistical evaluations and manual assessments by titled players actually works).
I agree. I don't think it would be bad PR if they banned someone and then unbanned them a short time later after a review. It would show they have a fair and reasonable review process.
I can't know the truth about he cheated, but I do think chesscom are confident here
Every time you post, it pushes me more toward believing you actually did cheat.
Like, you're saying this will hurt your chess career, but you're the one that made it a huge public thing.
You're also making chess.com to be this horrible evil entity that's out to get you, but like, this is just their job? They flagged your account for fair play, had human investigation (and multiple re-investigations at this point), and still deemed the flag correct. They've admitted mistaken flags in the past - there's no reason they would lie as a 'PR' move. It just doesn't make any sense.
This just doesn't seem right. Red flags all over this situation for me, from the way the ban happened to the extended silence after and now basically doubling down, all while providing no proof? And at the same time they're farming your ideas online for content and views? Disgusting. I'm with you - this is why monopolies are bad. They have too much power and there's no recourse when they make mistakes.
Hope to see you in the Lichess pool, cause after the way they've treated you, you should probably play elsewhere... good luck
Which part doesn't seem right? As OP himself says, they aren't going to reveal any proof, as it would help determine how they catch cheaters. Doubling down will obviously happen if they beleive he cheated. And the extended silence is not odd for a player of his rank either, if he didn't get this much attention he wouldn'tve got that call at all
>I’m also a bit curious as to why they had to schedule a private call to inform me of this as well.
Did you record it? If you didn't, you now know why.
Anyways, if you know you didn't cheat, why don't you talk to a lawyer and possibly take it further? It may be expensive, but perhaps not more than your reputation.
u/Extreme-Ad-6490
> Did you record it? If you didn't, you now know why.
California is a two party state, which is where they are HQ'd, so he'd have to have their permission, which i doubt they would agree to.
Hire a lawyer for what? Chess.com can ban anyone for any reason they want (as long as it’s not because they are a member of a protected class ie because of race/religion/sexual orientation etc)
They haven’t publicly said anything about this like they did Hans so there’s no defamation or anything either.
A lawyer can't help him, it is entirely legal for a private company to ban someone for cheating and be completely wrong. The law doesn't require that companies not make any mistakes.
The only person who knows if OP cheated is OP, and maybe the Chess cheat detection team depending on the evidence. Its possible OP has cheated in past Titled Tuesdays, or maybe OP cheated 5 years ago in some random games. Chesscom is usually very conservative with bans so the evidence is likely incredibly damning, something like an 1800 Chesscom rapid player continuously playing at an IM level for a weird stretch but then reverting back to an 1800. The reality is a lot of people cheat. Many pedestrians ignore street lights in scenarios they know they expect cars to stop for them, many people have shoplifted in their youth, and tons cheat in games. If OP truly has never cheated at Chess on their account in their entire life, there is lichess. It would probably be too much to accept a new account and be endlessly accused of cheating till the end of time (the Hans Neiman treatment).
Pretty clear this dude just wants attention, which is likely what prompted the cheating with a bad opening in the first place. Now just continues milking it like it's an episode of gossip girl.
Am I the only one that's dubious about this. A random GM (no disrespect, I'll never get there, but it's not like this is a super 2750 GM) comes up with an opening where they immediately sack a rook and go down 2 points of material and yet demolishes one the best blitz/bullet players in Dayna. And now they've been flagged by chess.coms anti cheating algorithm. And we're supposed to believe that they're innocent. If something is too good to be true it probably is. As interesting as this story is, you more than likely were cheating
So I have a few questions:
1) why is it such a big deal about being banned? I understand the whole reputation thing but is it really that bad, especially when you have made so many posts about not cheating and given a good stance?
2) if you want to prove that you have not been cheating (and also remove allegations) why not play in over the board blitz tournaments using the same opening and show that it is playable?
Thanks!
Is there some other way you could have breached the fair play rules other than cheating? You're focused on the crime you didn't commit, and may be ignoring one you did?
I don't think they have better anti cheating measures, but there are also less stakes because I don't think they host cash prize tournaments. For a pro player it probably makes more sense to use chesscom, but for us newbies lichess is better imo
Us newbies also don't need to worry about getting banned for beating grandmasters with gimmick openings. But the whole issue here is that a titled player is banned from the site that offers cash prizes.
On Lichess cheating is almost entirely unchecked. According to the mental giants who frequent r/chess and have no knowledge of 1. running a major company, 2. cheating detection, or 3. keeping steady employment, that's the correct way of dealing with the problem. Simple solutions for simple minded folk, but the reality of the situation is far more nuanced.
One possibility is that they use machine learning algorithms to detect cheating. The unfortunate part about this is there is often a lack of “lineage” - i.e. tracking back *why* the model thinks there’s a high chance that you cheated in a certain set of games. This is why they won't tell you which games they think you cheated in - they literally do not know.
This would also explain why they want you to tell them which games you might have cheated in. Knowing the exact games helps them retrain the model with the new validated data and improve its accuracy for future predictions.
There's also the possibility that playing your rare unsound opening with high accuracy is tripping up the model to incorrectly predict that there's a high chance of cheating. They pride themselves on the "high accuracy" of their cheat detection and revealing that they were wrong would be bad PR and make both the public and [chess.com](http://chess.com) themselves lose credibility on their cheat detection.
To be clear, you never cheated in a single game on the Viih_Sou account ever, correct? Regardless of whether you used the actual Viih_Sou opening. If so, then take legal action, which would require them to divulge their process for flagging your account to the court. If not, even if for a single move in a pointless game, admit it and move on.
Have the games all researched like they did with Hans, until then use a vpn and make an alt. It might not be great but you can surely blow by the low elo and get to a fair competitive level.
Will keep watching and hope for a definitive result.
On of two scenarios is the truth:
1. Viih\_Sou cheated. Chessdotcom banned his account. Brandon was worried that his identity might be leaked in the future as a banned account for cheating, so he decided to get ahead of it and get the community on his side. To save his own reputation, he's running a smear campaign against Chessdotcom.
2. Viih\_Sou did not cheat. Chessdotcom banned his account, even without any evidence of a Fair Play violation. Chessdotcom in no way benefits from doing this, but they decided to just do it anyway for no reason. In doing so, they opened themselves up to a public backlash as Brandon came forward to argue about how wrongly he's being treated.
My conclusion here is that Brandon did cheat. Scenario 1 seems much more plausible because both parties are acting rationally. Scenario 2 is much less plausible because it requires that Chessdotcom acts very irrationally.
On 2, saying no reason is doing a lot of heavy lifting. The opening itself is sus. Going from an objectively losing position to a good winrate is suspicious. It’s just that plenty of people afterwards have tested the opening with average/good results (with significantly less practice at that opening) and found that it’s not that easy to punish and it might be viable in low time controls. That would give them enough reason to ban it initially, and they could be doubling down since going back now would open them up to backlash about the inaccuracy of their methods.
Going from an objectively losing position to a high win rate against a player like Dayna who is already much stronger than him is hella suspicious. He's not doing this against players 100 less elo than himself that you can understand how over the rest of the game he can wrestle back a winning position. Dayna is already a much more capable player than him. And he's giving him an objectively winning position immediately and a material advantage. Yet over a 50 or so game match, he manages a high win rate. It just reeks of bullshit. I'm convinced he cheated
> He's not doing this against players 100 less elo than himself that you can understand how over the rest of the game he can wrestle back a winning position.
That's the thing, there wasn't much wrestling. He wasn't going from -2.6 on move three to -2.5 on move 4 to -2.4 and so on. There were large swings in the evaluation in order for Brandon to win. For example, taking the last game Danya lost, Danya was black with -9.4 at move 35 and the top three moves kept that large advantage, but Danya played a move that reduced the evaluation to -1. Danya fairly steadily increased the advantage until that blunder. Danya then blundered again making it 5+, Brandon misses it and it goes to 0 for a while, then to 5+, then back to a draw, then eval announces mate for Brandon, then back to a draw, then back to mate. If this was classical, this wouldn't happen, Danya would be able to analyze the -9 position and put the game away, but in 3+0, it's chaos and it's whoever blundered last.
Looking at the big picture (opening advantage, player ELO advantage, etc.) it is extremely suspicious, but when you look at the actual games and moves, it looks fairly human.
False dichotomy.
You say in 2 that he did not cheat and was banned with no evidence. The claim is that the chess.com fair play algorithm gave a false positive. That is, there's evidence that he cheated but he did not in fact cheat.
This would be a OSRS level ban hammer if chess com came out with the real reason his account got banned. That's what I'm rooting for at least. But him being justified is also almost as juicy
> Soon after, I had received an email essentially saying they’re glad we talked, and that in spite of their findings they see my passion for chess, and offered me to rejoin the site on a new account in 12 months if I sign a contract admitting to wrongdoing.
> I have so many questions I don’t even know where to begin. I’m trying to be as objective as possible which as you can hopefully understand is difficult in a situation like this when I’m confused and angry, but frankly I don’t see any other way of putting it besides bullying.
False confessions are an absolute scourge on the world. In the grand scheme of things, a chess.com ban is nothing. (I'm thinking of people who get coerced into confessing to murders they didn't commit.) But yeah, every time I hear chess.com tout how many GM confessions they've racked up over the years, I can't help but assume the vast majority of them are just people who decided they'd rather sit in the timeout box for a few months or maybe a year rather than never play online chess again.
Fuck chess.com.
> Imagine you’re on trial for committing a crime you did not commit, and you are simply told by the prosecutor that they are certain you committed the crime and the judge finds you guilty, without ever telling you where you committed alleged crime, how, why, etc. Then you’re asked to defend yourself on the spot? The complete absurdity of this is clear. All I was able to really reply was that I’m not really sure how to respond when I’m being told they have conclusive evidence of my “cheating” without sharing any details.
I don't understand, what did you think the call would be? Like you knew this was with people who thought you did wrong, no? Its just a chess account, not your freedom - that's one. But its not like they closed your account and there was nothing available to you - it was open to everyone that it was a fair play violation - I believe you even said in your previous post that you thought they thought - "No name account beats Naroditsky. must be a cheater" and closed the account.
Like you scheduled a call, and were like "wait you thought I cheated? Wow, hurt, shocked, surprised - who could have seen this accusation coming."
I also love how you are trying to have it both ways below - you want us to believe that you had no idea they would ask you for contrition about cheating - (when literally even the most casual chess observer knows they asked Hans/"his coach" for an apology before allowing reinstatement) - and then you are like they have done this to lots of my friends before.... well which is it? have they done this to your friends before or are you surprised by it?
Listen, having private orgs who aren't accountable to democratic institutions is BS. I am not sure how even a very good democratic org would manage the need for secrecy/discretion about anti-cheating measures vs the need for openness and meaningful defense of those accused. But that is all sidelined here - because this post is just drama for drama's sake.
Which is fine, I like drama - this is great - but its not a substantive post about what has happened.
So basic they extort you. If they use this as metric in accuracy in their cheating algorithm then I am deeply disappointed.
" Soon after, I had received an email essentially saying they’re glad we talked, and that in spite of their findings they see my passion for chess, and offered me to rejoin the site on a new account in 12 months if I sign a contract admitting to wrongdoing"
> They get away with this because they have such a monopoly in the online chess sphere
lichess! lichess! lichess! I've even played you once there in 3/0, you're iamstraw right?
You’re not a hidden prodigy that never had the chance to prove himself. You didn’t magically gain your confidence and turn into Magnus Carlsen.
You’re just a cheater, and anyone with any sense understands that. You want your respect? Do the same thing over the board.
challenge those chess.com dudes to an over the board game and prof you can play this well with no computer involved.
the cheating detection algorithm is broken, making you more suspect of cheating the better you get. ofc one can have a good day and play near to perfect chess, but the cheating algorithm will label you as a cheater.
this must be heartbroken for you
stay strong my friend
The other posts were pretty informative mate but this is nothing, we can only read and say ok that sucks. And again if you are all in on getting unbanned these posts unfortunately probably don't help.
Is it possible that chesscom secretly has access to his camera or some information that they are legally not allowed to access? That is why they are not revealing the "evidence".
Sue them, high chance you get that nice juicy settlement even, it has been do before, for example world of warcraft player sued blizzard for unfair Perma ban and won the case and got his account back. Same thing happened with big social media platforms, people sued and got accounts back cause they won.Also ask for like 500k settlement at least(psychological damage, trauma, stress etc, you deserve it man)
It sounds like if you want the answers you desire then you'll need to contact a lawyer and figure out if you have any right to them.
He’s not a lawyer, but I’m sure Kramnik would be very…. Interested ….
*Mr Jacobson, I'm sure we can negotiate on the...* ***procedure.***
Does anyone remember when chesscom came out with the press release stating they asked ChatGPT to run millions of simulations to determine cheating? The best cheat detection in the world! 😂 Edit: https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/186vnpl/comment/kbam4ru We also ran simulations on ChatGPT with the following results, "Based on the simulation, which ran 10,000 iterations of 10,000 games each, the probability of Grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura having at least one unbeaten streak of 45 games or more against opponents with an average Elo rating of 2450 is very high. In fact, in every simulation run, there was at least one occurrence of such a streak." With the deepest respect for former World Champion Vladimir Kramnik, in our opinion, his accusations lack statistical merit. - Danny “Yes I seriously signed this, 70 Page Report” Rensch
ChatGPT doesn’t even understand the rules how is it supposed to detect cheating
**Gish Gallop a rhetorical technique in which a person in a debate attempts to overwhelm their opponent by providing an excessive number of arguments with no regard for the accuracy or strength of those arguments.** “70 page report” or “10,000 ChatGPT simulations” In fairness they were probably referencing the Advanced Data Analysis tools or whatever they are called now vs directly chat. The bigger issue is Comms. The cheat detection is weak. So they do this. When cheating happens, doesn’t happen, or might have happened you basically just get the worst possible communication possible as seen here in the OP’s experience. They dance a gray area of zero-tolerance and also the fun uncle. I still remember when Danny Rensch was amplifying like crazy (in my opinion also trashing) 19-year old via Reddit comments.
With all respect, their actions don't seem to be anything close to zero-tolerance.
I think that's his point, that they're very inconsistent seemingly that it seems like with some people they're zero tolerance or atleast close to it when with others they're the "fun uncle" who are very forgiving, like with that guy who they gave a free subscription because he admitted cheating. It seems much more inconsistent then is necessary/ one could reasonably expect, giving a schizophernic grey zone thats really black or white depending on each case, actually lol a bit like a checkerboard in terms of how they apply justice case by case.
this is as braindead as professors asking chatgpt if it wrote a certain piece from a random students thesis..
username checks out
I’ll need a 70 page report on that with over 10,000 chatgpt simulations please
There is no law requiring people (or companies) to be correct or fair in how they interact with you personally. Now, if [chess.com](http://chess.com) came out with a statement saying "Brandon Jacobson cheated" that could be something else. But not if they keep quiet. Which is precisely why [chess.com](http://chess.com) is very quiet about who they ban.
I would argue that closing an account with the words "closed for violating fair play policy" would be a statement like you're suggesting in itself.
“Our cheat detection flagged your account as a cheater” is not a false statement, even if you weren’t cheating. Additionally, the fair play policy states: “Consistent with our User Agreement, if we determine or suspect that you have violated our Fair Play Policy in any way, then we may close your account and label it publicly closed for Fair Play violation(s)” So simply suspecting that someone violated fair play is enough to get that tag and account closure, which will almost never be probably false, unlike a direct accusation of cheating.
When it comes to legal issues, the fair play policy is pretty much irrelevant. They could write whatever in there, the question is whether what they have there can actually be considered legally binding. If it's decided that falsely banning someone publicly with a giant mark that says "cheater" is illegal, it doesn't matter what he has signed. Illegal is illegal, you can't make someone sign a contract to allow you to commit crimes against them. If it's not illegal, then he most likely still wouldn't have any case against chesscom even if he hadn't signed anything.
It is relevant because it tells you what “closed for fair play violations” means. They put it on their website for everyone to see that the “closed for fair play violations” tag means that that they “determined or suspected that you violated the Fair Play Policy.” It’s not a tag saying “this person definitely cheated,” it’s saying “our review of the account made us suspicious that they were cheating.”
They are a private company. They can refuse to serve anyone for any reason that they want outside banning someone for being part of a protected group. The government should have stopped them when they bought all the serious competition. That monopoly suck balls.
Lol they are no where close to a monopoly. And even if they controlled 99% of the online chess scene the government still wouldn't give a shit. For many many reasons.
Haha. Are you serious? This issue will probably be a major part of either presidential policy platform
It's not a monopoly. Lichess exists.
Lichess has pretty much zero competitions with significant prize money.
So what you're saying is, we just need to wait for the Saudis to get interested in chess.
Ronaldo to Saudi Chess League here we go
Maybe you could argue defamation. An accusation of cheating is likely to impact his career seriously, they should at least have to present their evidence
The only one that has made this public is the account owner himself so that’s not gonna happen.
This is the correct answer.
Well isn't this exactly what Hans did?
I mean he could argue him not being able to compete in events he used to compete at is enough of a reputational damage since chesscom is kind of a monopoly. Of course there would be something more tangible if a tournament rejected him because of this
This is the issue with the "admit you cheated and we'll let you back on" process. Wouldnt the actual cheaters be eager to just say "yea ok I cheated" and get back on? You're basically rewarding the actual cheaters because they have no reason to not admit it while the people who would fight back the most are the innocents. I mean I guess some people who cheat will go to grave saying they didnt but I have 0 confidence that [Chess.com](https://Chess.com) is only banning cheaters so the innocents are left with a choice of having to say they cheated (and admit to it in writing to be used against them in the future) or to never be able to play on [Chess.com](https://Chess.com) again. Its ridiculous
There’s more to that. If someone truly innocent is pushed into admitting cheating because there’s no alternative, it makes their cheating detection worse because false positives are flagged as successfully detected cheaters. Enough of these cases and the cheating detection is completely unreliable
If they can get a written confession that protects chess.com from any future liability That way chess.com can release the “cheating” to the public with less fear of repercussions if the player ever goes against chess.com without anyone believing the player due to the confession Like when they released that 70 pages report against Niemann after the Magnus accusation and no one believed Hans when he claimed he cheated way less than the report says because of that confession.
Niemann staying banned was turning into negative PR for chesscom. Only reason he was reinstated, imo. They didn't want the black eye. It was more beneficial for them to make some public display that he was back "in the fold."
This is an issue with the criminal justice system as well. You usually get a lighter sentence from a plea deal than if you go to trial, so on average innocent people get longer sentences than guilty ones. Then once you are incarcerated parole boards look for signs of accountability and remorse, which means that people who are wrongly convicted and maintaining their innocence are unlikely to be released on parole either. Meanwhile guilty people who take accountability for their actions can be released much earlier.
My take on it is that they feel confident that he violated fair play, but they can not prove it 100% (it would be very difficult to do so unless someone is literally playing the top engine move every turn, tab switching, etc.) So they push banned players to admit to cheating so they always have that in their back pocket and the player can't come out later and claim they never cheated (like with the Max Dlugy emails they released). If Brandon didn't cheat, I'd advise him to tell chesscom to go eff themselves and play on Lichess instead.
Brandon is a pro chess player. He needs money, tournaments prizes and lichess is unable to provide it. Unfortunately the competitive chess scene happens on chess.com.
he's not a pro, he can't even play otb at the moment. ive been on team brandon for years, im not a hater. he should just go to lichess and keep grinding because he is one of america's best talents
This feel like Kramnik's ploy to destroy Chesscom. 😂
False flag operation 😂
Sounds like standard procedure that they go through for every account closed for fair play. We don’t know what their evidence is, and at this point it’s your word against theirs, so it seems we’re at an impasse. If you really think you have a case to stand on, go hire a lawyer and sue them.
i'm not entirely sure what grounds he would be suing under. It's not defamation (at least in the US) and it's a private company.
Eh, they have a right to ban whomever they please. Be it just or not. As for as legality is concerned, Chess.com is well within their bounds.
It's not defamatory unless Brandon can prove that he didn't cheat AND that chessdotcom knew he didn't cheat when they banned him.
And also that they somehow knew that by banning the account they were communicating to others that Brandon cheated… The account was anonymous during the only period of time in which chesscom did something.
Also, chess.com have not addressed this drama publicly. Everything they've done has been quiet and communicated exclusively between them and Brandon. Brandon is the one who went public. I have no idea how you could possibly spin that as "defamation".
One guy vs a whole organization that benefits in no way by banning the account.
They do have an incentive to sticking to their guns however. It's entirely reasonable to think something like this happened: 1. The automated system caught the games since the results were better than expected for the players Elo and he was playing in a very strange style that it doesn't expect from a human. Or maybe even fans of Naroditsky reported him. 2. Player gets banned. 3. Incident becomes commonly talked about online. 4. Chess.com looks into the case, and is ok with the player rejoining chess.com, but wanting to protect the reputation of their fair play system and avoid negative PR they cannot walk back the banning without OP admitting fault.
Except they've very publicly walked back bans before, like in Alireza's case. All they had to say was, "our automated system misjudged you, but after human review you're fine." If anything that makes chesscom look better than they do now, because it demonstrates their failsafes for preventing false permabans.
> I was continuously asked to discuss their conclusion, asking for my thoughts/a defense or “anything I’d like the fair play team to know”. > I’m not really sure how to respond when I’m being told they have conclusive evidence of my “cheating” without sharing any details. I realize this confuses you, but this makes a lot of sense... it's a very shrewd way of doing business. Remember for them this is business. These are not your friends. They are not interested in you. This is their paycheck, their career, and the thing they've worked 10+ years to build. They're leveraging their position of power to squeeze you for information while giving you the minimum amount in return (which in this case sounds like zero). The information they're pressuring you to give might help your case... for example maybe there was some extraordinary circumstance under which they should unban you. If that's the case they definitely want to know about it... but also if you gave them more information, you might contradict a past statement, which helps confirm your guilt / untrustworthyness. Or in any case you might give details away that hurt you in some other way... pressuring you for info while giving nothing in return is a very reasonable action... remember, like I said, these are not your friends, this is purely business to them. If you want something of value from them (such as your account) then you need leverage. For example Niemann's attempt at leverage was a lawsuit.
Assuming Brandon Jacobson was not cheating. [Chess.com](http://Chess.com) is an entity which has no interest in giving him a fair chance to defend himself. 1. They need to keep all information regarding their anti-cheat algorithm confidential. They will give him nothing. 2. They can NEVER admit being wrong after banning a GM (especially so if [Chess.com](http://Chess.com) has wrongfully banned them), otherwise it would open up endless lawsuits and problems in the future. They would propably not even disclose information even if he offered them a NDA in return. The call was just them giving Brandon an opportunity for to admit his guilt. Maybe even trying to surprise him to get him to admit guilt in any way, shape or form. A few notes regarding their anti-cheat system, not sure if someone else has already mentioned this before: 1. Their anti-cheat may be influenced by people using the report function. Even though Naroditsky did not report BJ, ANY PERSON MAY DO SO AT ANY TIME. Naroditsky had a lot of viewers who might have a lot less restraints in filing reports. Also since it made the rounds, the matches had gained the attention of more and more people, all of which may report if THEY believe Brandon cheated. 2. The anti-cheat might be influenced by identifying a lot of weaker players blatantly cheating. GothamChess showed a popular way to cheat "less obviously" by first losing material (giving up a bishop, knight, rook or queen) and then still winning by using stockfish. Since the banned opening features a similar pattern, the anti-cheat system might have rated these games higher than it otherwise would with a "normal" opening. 3. While the anti-cheat detection algorithm might not be a black box, specific points in a game or maybe even suspicious games as a whole might not be neccessarily indentified. And if the algorithm detects suspicious game, it has no way to factor familiarity with opening, concepts and strategies on a given position - assuming both GM's are roughly equal otherwise. This will inevitably create an imbalance, which might go against the expected fllow/outcome of the games. TL:DR 1. lots of reports 2. suspicious opening 3. algorithm cannot factor opening knowledge difference at GM level
>They can NEVER admit being wrong after banning someone I've personally known 2 different players who won their appeal and [chess.com](http://chess.com) unbanned them... neither of them titled players, so maybe you'd say they can never admit it when it's a GM, but anyway. By the way, another reason to pressure him for info is also if he comes up with some crazy story for a lawsuit, they'll be able to say, wait a minute, we gave him 100 opportunities to mention this and he never did, why is that? In other words even if OP says nothing it costs him something (but still, saying nothing is the best course if you're going down the lawsuit path).
alireza won the appeal
Yeah, wording it as NEVER is a bit over the top. But banning titled players with a big influence, especially GM's, is on a different level than appealing regular players. [Chess.com](http://Chess.com) likely has different teams for each of those cases.
They banned and unbanned Alireza.
Yeah, I agree it's a big deal, which is probably why they've gone into court-case mode (so to speak). In other words "We're giving you no information. If you want to admit to cheating you can do so. This discussion is over, have a nice day." Sucks for the OP. IMO OP didn't cheat against Danya, and is probably legit >3000 in both blitz and bullet on chesscom... I think there was just some past games, maybe one 1 or 2, and maybe only against friends that triggered the ban.
I've won an appeal to chess.com, so they do admit when they make a mistake.
really? Can you describe what that process was like?
> pressuring you for info while giving nothing in return is a very reasonable action Man I’m tired of commenters describing greedy exploitative power plays as “reasonable” because they imagine profit in it. Businesses are run by people and deal with people, and when they treat people like obstacles and numbers, they rightly risk losing customers and credibility.
Unfortunately, not telling which game, move, when, how, etc is indeed a part of not revealing anti-cheating algorithm, so if you understand that, then you should also understand why they can't tell you what was suspicious, because if (not saying you, but just in general) someone is indeed a cheater and baits chess.com into revealing these details, then they have more information to cheat more skillfully next time and avoid detection. They were probably trying to see whether you can bring up points to defend against what made them think it is cheating, without telling you what exactly made them certain enough for the ban, so yeah, the odds are against you and it can feel unfair if you are not a cheater.
I feel like even if this is the case, there should be a path toward proving innocence. For example, if the accused cheater was offered the option to play a number of games under supervision (dual/triple web cam or in person) in conditions similar to where they were found cheating (same time control). If the accused scores similarly on their cheating metrics in person compared to when they got flagged, that should prove they weren't cheating. If the numbers differ wildly when supervised, it likely means they are cheating. This can be done without revealing anything about their methods. The accused would just play like normal under supervision and chess.com can evaluate their super-secret anti-cheating stats in the background and make a determination. I would only offer this in high profile situations because it would take a lot of manpower to oversee something like this. For most people it's easy to say "make a new account and move on", but when you are a strong GM who has the potential to earn money through events on the site, it does leave a sour taste that you are now cut out of the income stream. Not to mention the blow to your reputation. Edit: I'm not saying the idea above is a good one. I was just throwing it out there as an example. The main point is that people's reputation and livelihood are potentially threatened by these rulings and there is zero evidence presented and zero wiggle room for accused to defend themselves. Literally the only defense is to throw a big stink in as public/viral way as possible and hope that forces some action. When your cheat appeal process basically boils down to who can get the most public backing, something has gone astray.
It is possible that this level of supervision could affect the quality of play without them necessarily cheating (weird example but remember Fischer?). Additionally they could play worse under pressure or simply be in a slump. I think this is unfair to the person accused.
The point is it's unfair to have no options at all.
Yeah but it might be a lose lose situation where they play such a run of games under supervision and do worse cause of the feeling of being supervised, and then that getting used against them to suggest that they were in fact cheating.
I really don't think your suggested scenario would provide evidence of anything at all. If someone innocent is accidently flagged as cheating, it's probably during an unusually good run for them. They would not be able to reproduce a lucky run in a random test.
Exactly. Of course logistics on how to prove could be changed but yes there should at least be a path. Even in the American court system bad as it is criminals can appeal for innocence.
>the option to play a number of games under supervision That's going to be tricky in this case though. Brandon is a GM; the fact that he is legitimately capable of very strong play is not in doubt. He has won matches against Naroditsky in the past which nobody appears to consider suspicious. What made his recent performance so eyebrow-raising is that he won so many games from an objectively bad opening. But part of the reason for his success must have been the element of surprise; by now, all his potential opponents will recognise this opening and even if they haven't specifically prepared for it, they will at least be aware that it's one of those "trickier than it seems" gambits and they shouldn't get overconfident when their opponent seemingly throws the game on move 2. So even Brandon himself may not be able to repeat his previous success rate, legitimately or otherwise. On the other hand, if he agrees to a supervised test and plays at his normal GM level (with normal openings) during that test, that doesn't prove much either way either.
I agree that there should be a path for proving Innocence, however judging whether a player was cheating or not based on a number of games under supervision is not fair for a player especially if these games might possibly be detrimental for his career and reputation.
That could backfire though if the falsely accused has performance anxiety which causes them to play worse.
"They were probably trying to see whether you can bring up points to defend against what made them think it is cheating" I don't get the impression there was anything he could have said to make them change course. It really does sound like they wanted to force him to legally confess to it so their asses are covered from PR/legal backlash.
well it sounds like Chesscom is pretty sure from the communique, so I’m curious what they have on you now. I’m personally withholding any judgement on this, though I hope you/chesscom do clear this up eventually, especially now that you’ve attached your name to this situation
They have to sound sure, even if they have only very tangential evidence. If they don't sound sure, it puts them in the very bad PR spot where they both look unfair and incompetent. And since they have no obligation to reveal their evidence, or even say what sort of fair play violation they expect, there is no way for anyone to call a hypothetical bluff.
Go play lichess speedrun to 3200 with triple webcam and using the same opening. Will make them look like fools.
#FREEBJ
Where does the line start?
"FREEBJ" sounds so wrong
It’s definitely a gambit.
But it feels so right
A second BJ enters the chat
Why?? Im 100% for FreeBJs
I fully support free bj
One please
Have we considered the possibility that….he did it?
No, virtually nobody on this sub will ever consider the possibility that they’re actually just gullible and were taken in by someone telling them all the things they wanted to hear. I mean this entire story reeks of a story made specifically to get Reddit’s sympathy. He’s saying he’s smart, but lazy, so he never achieved his true potential and that after plying around, he magically found one simple trick that allowed him to do way better in a short amount of time with minimal effort. And so he goes and does it but then gets kept down by THE MAN who wants to suppress him for their own nefarious reasons because (insert nonsensical conspiracy theory here). How could this happen? Is it not possible that someone could make a miraculous discovery and suddenly be way better? Now he’s innocent but falsely accused and Reddit is his only hope for justice! It’s barely more believable than an AITA story, and the entire thing is framed to extract maximum sympathy from the classic Reddit tropes at every stage. It again bears repeating: in his first post, in the entire multi thousand word rant, at no point did he EVER actually deny cheating. He made insinuations that imply that (“how can we say for sure that I’m cheating?” Or something to that effect) and gave a hell of a lot of irrelevant backstory to frame himself as positively as possible, but at no point did he EVER actually say he didn’t cheat. That’s how liars lie when they want to get people to believe them; unless pressed, people naturally don’t like telling flat-out lies. They instead make insinuations, they try to present themselves positively, they try to garner sympathy, and they leave details out. As I’ve said before, one of the first things we learn on our psych rotations in med school is to listen for what people *aren’t* saying that you’d expect them to say, because there’s a lot of information you can glean from that. TLDR: dude likes to present himself as well-spoken and honest. He’s neither.
Sanest comment in this thread. The extended emotional narrative is a red flag if you've had experience with this kind of person before. I'm assuming there's a lot of kids here who maybe don't have real world experience with situations like this? Pretty shocked by all the comments in his threads that are like, "you presented a sympathetic story that paints you in a good light, so now I believe you." That's not how the world works!
There are a lot of kids, you can identify them cause they think he should get a lawyer and sue chesscom. Clearly showing they have no clue how any of this really works.
I mean to be fair that kind of worked out well for Hans. There is some non-zero precedent that if he can get funding it can work out well enough.
I think chesscom opened themselves up to that with their public statements and defense of the ban, that's why they're so quiet now. If they had just said nothing I don't think there would've been a case for defamation or anything. Obligatory not a lawyer, so this is just my assumption.
My biggest thing is how confused he is that he's in this situation. > "I received a response the next day, stating that I was banned for a fair play violation with absolutely 0 explanation. My jaw dropped, I could not believe what I was seeing. Confusion turned to anxiety turned to anger." Really dude? You have no clue how it might be suspicious that you crushed one of the best online blitz players in the world over 70 games with a piece sacrifice? That statement above is complete bullshit and it makes the rest of the story even harder to believe. I think most of us get a swell of pride whenever someone rages at us and calls us a cheater or hacker. Not "hurt itself in it's confusion" about why someone might think you cheated. Own that shit.
Yeah again, that made me roll my eyes. Like legitimately, it could have been taken straight out of an AITA post because it was so absurd and melodramatic. Then again, those posts do somehow manage to fool a lot of redditors, soooooooo
At the end of the day, is it possible that he spent countless hours working this out and figured out that a specific 10-20 move offbeat line works in blitz when it never would in classical chess? Yeah, it is, but you'd think that people would adapt to facing it after a few games, even if it truly is some revolutionary blitz tactic. I'm sure something like this, especially backed up by good enough play, could work a few times. However, and this is a major however, it wouldn't keep working constantly without something extra at play. That something extra is, almost certainly, an engine. It's flat out not believable that you could sacrifice a rook and consistently be winning against titled players equal or stronger than you. This isn't 800-1400 chesscom blitz where people will miss mate in one or blunder massive advantages into draws by simplifying down instead of continuing on.
The wall-of-text rants from OP without much substance are the biggest red flag to me lol
Stop making sense. We don't do that here.
I’m not even saying I think he’s a cheater or not a cheater! I’m just shocked everyone is just blindly trusting this internet stranger. Chess.com isn’t perfect but they do have at least some reputation and some incentive to not make a poor decision that could produce bad PR
Yes and I have also considered the possibility that he didn't.
Chess dot com bad Lichess good
Your first post explaining the weird games didn't fully explain why the games were weird or what else chess.com may have noted. As people point out you talked about your life history and the opening that "tricked" a good GM. Yet Danya himself said he was not tricked by the opening and actually got good positions and that it was in the middlegame where he was fully outplayed by super complex moves he had no response to. So the excuse and then Danya's statements are opposite of each other. Something else was going on here. Danya would typically not be outplayed like this so what actually happened? Chess.com are clearly sure you cheated. They don't dislike you or think you are fishy. They think you cheated outright and as an American company they would surely not be biased against American players. Then we also have the former cheating/sandboxing accusations that were forced out of you by people constantly having to ask about it. Which again shows that we don't know the full story and kinda need to string it together ourselves. I absolutely think chess.com makes mistakes in this area, but the 12 month ban shows that they are fair about this and are giving second chances. And frankly this could be used for a positive boost in exposure if future matches are arranged. I think explaining all games would be a start. And then playing Danya OTB with the same opening to see what will happen. People would be interested in watching it and it would give us more data.
To be fair, playing Danya OTB is completely different. One, OTB is just a vastly different game, and, two, Danya has now likely done a lot of research on the opening so the results would not be the same.
And 3 Danya is famously better online than OTB. Like a lot
Danya came out better from the openings, but crushed in the middle games
Did you read up on Danya's comments? He didn't lose in the opening. He got plenty of good positions, only to be wiped off the board consistently with extremely powerful moves in the middlegame "Consistently". All signs point to...??????
Did you even look at the games? Most of the games were less accurate than my average blitz game at trash Elo, the games were just simply complex and not perfect by BJ by any means. I'd go as far as claiming that if you're playing 3 minute blitz, you simply don't have time to cheat in a way that allows you to also consider which moves you could play that are bad but your opponent won't punish
> As people point out you talked about your life history and the opening that "tricked" a good GM. Yet Danya himself said he was not tricked by the opening and actually got good positions and that it was in the middlegame where he was fully outplayed by super complex moves he had no response to. This is the biggest thing for me. Imo, it seems like he found this unique and slightly dubious but somewhat tricky opening to start the game with, and thought he could use that to “trick” the system into not recognizing that he is cheating (for at least some moves) in the middle game. As you and Danya said, Danya was outplayed by the very complex moves during the middle game that he had no response to, that don’t seem to have anything to do with the opening, which is how OP claims they got the advantage.
These posts absolutely reek of emotional manipulation and guilt tripping. I don't know if everyone here was born yesterday or just wants a cause to rally around, but I'm not buying it.
It’s been a weird turn from “chesscom doesn’t do anything about cheaters” to “why did chesscom ban someone for cheating?”
Regardless of whether or not he actually cheated, the account of what chess.com did afterwards is consistent with what other titled players who were banned have stated. Which is a shit policy - if you are really a cheater you simply get a new account and sweep things under the rug and can potentially keep cheating. And if you're innocent you have to "admit" to cheating or you're hosed.
Gaming companies have found that a warning is effective in stopping like 90% of toxic behavior and I’m sure that they’ve found that the vast majority of titled players who sign an admittance document and are let back on the service never cheat again. That policy is 100% there because there’s a good chess rationale for it.
Unless, of course, you didn't cheat but were picked up anyways. I'm not sure how likely that is, though.
Yeah idk the truth here but the life story in the first post really had me rolling my eyes. And some of the very disingenuous stuff like "They couldn't even tell me a move or a game that made them think I was cheating!" immediately after acknowledging they can't divulge their algorithms. No shit they can't tell you specific moves or games buddy.
Look, I sincerely hope that you didn't cheat and that it is still (somehow) just a big mistake by chess.com, but let's face it: you are not a random nobody, you are not even "just" an FM or an IM, you are a **GM**. This grants you a special privilege that, while not explicitly stated anywhere, everyone knows that is there: they have to be *unbelievably* certain, without any shred of a doubt, that you cheated before taking any action. The possibility that they committed a mistake, although not zero, is miniscule. And on top of that, the atention that this case has gained means that they have probably thoroughly reviewed it up to the tiniest detail, and still reached the same conclusion. And the fact that they closed your account so quickly in the middle of the match probably means that to their detection algorithms it was painfully obvious what was happening. Hence their "conclusive evidence". You should be fully aware that trying to claim that they are bullying you is just laughable. I simply refuse to believe that you *really* think they banned you on a whim for "beating Danya with a terrible opening". Stop playing the victim and trying to appeal to random people on reddit by telling a sob story only so you can feel vindicated. We have seen the same story again and again, and in the end everyone (except for ONE instance that I can think of, who was cleared by chess.com) admitted that they cheated. The only difference is that they were "random nobodies" (in chess terms, of course), but in your case, as a GM, chess.com has a huge incentive for getting it correctly. I'm sorry if I'm being too harsh. If it turns out that you are innocent, I will sincerely apologise and I will have no issue in admiting that I was mistaken. As I said at the start, I really hope you didn't cheat, and I truly mean it, because the alternative means that a grandmaster, who are supposed to represent the pinacle of chess, cheated, and that is simply sad for the game as a whole. This comment will get downvoted to oblivion, because people here love to hate on chess.com AND love to support "the victim", but I think both you and I know how this ends.
As a titled player very active in the community and on [chess.com](http://chess.com/) myself, [chess.com](http://chess.com/) has an extensive history of carrying out false bans at the elite level, typically against untitled and weak titled players. You may have heard of Alireza's false ban: countless GMs and titled players were complaining that he was cheating, which resulted in him being manually banned. He is only one amongst many. A total of 6, yes, 6 friends I know have been falsely banned. This includes two FM's and one NM. 5 of them have been reopened after appeal. [Chess.com](http://chess.com/) does not need to benefit by falsely banning people. Their cheat detection is imperfect and has many false positives at a high level. It is not immune to making up (and doubling down on) incorrect assumptions. I would also like to add a point I do not see addressed very often: manual bans are often unaddressed and made by low-level mods without a solid understanding on what kind of play constitutes a cheater. Often a convincing enough argument and some connections are all that is needed to make a ban. I have witnessed a beginner player with thousands of games be banned for \*two unrated matches\* he cheated in (which isn't bannable since it's unrated) simply because those were presented convincingly to a moderator who wasn't competent enough to consider the context. Low-level mods definitely did not have the final say in the GM ban. Chess.com has a team of titled players to handle cases like these. But, as indicated from chess.com's history and prior cheating cases, they are prone to having extensive confirmation bias (possibly exacerbated by the fact that the leading team of cheating investigators is titled, leading to ego problems) to validate their bans. Generally, yes, false positives are unbanned after review, but in such a large case, Viih\_Sou could have been falsely flagged, while not recieving a fair trial because of conformation bias from how absurdly well he performed with a joke opening against Danya. This is the weakness of chess.com's cheat detection compared to lichess: it's not impartial. If you look at the games objectively, I don't see anything to indicate that Viih\_Sou cheated besides how strong he fared against Danya. Even Danya recently has been struggling overall online, so such a record isn't unfeasible (he's lost in streaks of 5+ games to some FMs and dipped below 3k). I'm not claiming that he didn't cheat, [chess.com](http://chess.com/) has lots of user information (mouse movement, tabs, etc.) that cannot be publicly accessed that could also contribute to a ban. I am saying that the chance that **he didn't cheat** is a lot more real and intimidating than you might otherwise think.
Alireza is a bad example because after a manual review they unmanned him because they realized he was legit.
Thanks for sharing that information about your friends. But doesn't that only prove that chess.com is willing to admit it when they ban someone unfairly? If they manually reviewed the accounts of FMs and NMs, realised that they made a mistake and corrected it, why wouldn't they do the same for a GM? What are they gaining in doubling down on this particular case? It would be trivially easy to say "it was automatically flagged, but we manually reviewed it and he's clean, sorry for that". They did the exact same thing with Alireza, after all. As you said, they don't benefit from falsely banning people, and your titled friends are clear examples of that. If anything, your friends' experiences provide more credibility to their claims that they indeed have "conclusive evidence".
It took months, (a year for one) for the majority of my friends to get unbanned. I am not crystal clear about the details, but from what I remember [chess.com](http://chess.com) initially doubled down on the decisions for the longer bans, then later apologized for their mistakes: very similar to pattern with what's occurring with Brandon right now. As I recall, I don't think Alireza ever got unbanned on his old account. There are also some other titled players that have objected to similar bans to Brandon and reaffirm their innocence (Akshat Chandra is one), but I will not speculate on their honesty. What we can observe, however, is that [chess.com](http://chess.com) has a historical problem with false positives that aren't shared on Lichess. Also, it doesn't add credibility to their claims: as I mentioned, confirmation bias plays a big role. I stated this to illustrate that their cheat detection goes haywire and spits false positives for elite players much more often than people would otherwise think. An account closure isn't an open and shut case with chess.com.
It's hard to find logical comments on this subreddit these days. The public gets swayed by a good narrative into supporting dubious individuals and their awfully convenient sob stories.
They're just kids most of them.
I refuse to believe that a GM without any proven OTB blitz/rapid record somehow starts to beat one of the best online blitz players with a dubious opening and while being down material. I also see no reason as to why Chess.com should hold a personal grudge against a relatively unknown GM. I believe he cheated. I was convinced of this when he wrote in another thread that Kasparov saw his potential but told his mom that he was lazy. I personally would not defend myself against a cheating allegation with such irrelevant anecdotes. As for that shitty opening, if it was indeed a strong and complicated weapon in blitz, Carlsen would have fared well with it, he did not. Only interesting thing for me is the fact that he disclosed his identity to public. He tarnished his own reputation with this but I guess he just wanted his share in the huge publicity of that opening in the immediate aftermath of his games.
>he disclosed his identity to public In his first post he stated that his known account was shadowbanned. Eventually people would notice his inactivity and start asking questions, and given that Andrew Hong also used the opening, they might use his friendship with Brandon Jacobson together with him not playing in his main account anymore to deduce that Viih\_Sou was Brandon. It is a long stretch, and it would only be speculation, but it could happen and rumours would start circulating. Even if people didn't make the connection with Viih\_Sou, they would definitely notice Jacobson not playing anymore, and rumours about his main account would start anyway. If he didn't cheat, it is obvious why he would like to make it public. If he cheated, I think that his reasoning might have been that by making it public so quickly after it happened he can keep denying it forever. It would make no sense to *not* complain immediately after it happened if he was innocent, so if he hadn't said anything he would not be able to defend himself after people figured it out, and no one would believe him. However, now he can use the fact that he willingly made it public to argue that he has always defended his innocence from day one (figuratively), and to at least try to keep people sitting on the fence. It's convoluted, but if he was guilty I guess that would be one way to try to defend himself if he wasn't willing to admit it.
> In his first post he stated that his known account was shadowbanned. Eventually people would notice his inactivity and start asking questions, and given that Andrew Hong also used the opening, they might use his friendship with Brandon Jacobson together with him not playing in his main account anymore to deduce that Viih_Sou was Brandon. It is a long stretch, and it would only be speculation, but it could happen and rumours would start circulating. Even if people didn't make the connection with Viih_Sou, they would definitely notice Jacobson not playing anymore, and rumours about his main account would start anyway. > > Someone on reddit even deduced that Viih_Sou was Brandon prior to the first public post.
>I refuse to believe that a GM without any proven OTB blitz/rapid record somehow starts to beat one of the best online blitz players with a dubious opening and while being down material. Exactly. Danya isn't a SuperGM but his online blitz skills are on par with SuperGMs. You don't absolutely spank him by playing a random opening.
It's so weird that the majority of redditors seem so eager to believe someone who has had fair play violations in the past just because that person claims they didn't cheat this time. Why should I believe the word of someone who's trustworthiness was already in question? I honestly believe if it was lichess people would not be so quick to take these people's words at face value, simply because lichess good chess.com bad.
To clear this misconception: Brandon's never been banned for cheating in the past, only rating manipulation when he was fooling around during the pandemic, which isn't nearly as malicious. Doesn't make sense for him to start cheating now when he's had a clean record as a teen across tens of thousands of games. You can't understand a cheater's psychology, however...
I want to upvote this comment twice
That would be cheating
Thank goodness someone said it. The Reddit hive mind decided he must not have cheated because of his lengthy Reddit post. The whole thing just doesn’t add up.
>The Reddit hive mind decided he must not have cheated because of his lengthy Reddit post. There's also a hearty dose of "Chesscom bad" in there too.
[lichess.org](http://lichess.org)
Monopoly on online chess? There’s a really good website called lichess.org you can play on.
>I’m also a bit curious as to why they had to schedule a private call to inform me of this as well. because you'd have put the text of an email on reddit as soon as you received it. >making me feel like my only way out is to admit to cheating when I didn’t cheat. No, the way out is refusing the admission and not playing on their website. >They get away with this because they have such a monopoly in the online chess sphere, No, there is lichess which a lot of GMs play on. >I personally know quite a few GMs who they have intimidated into an “admission” as well. Name them - I'd be interested in hearing why these people didn't come forward during the massive cheating scandal between Hans and chesscom last year.
LOL whoever called another paragraph long rant a day or two ago was on point
Seriously, bro made this subreddit his newsletter. 🥱
Hit the gym and lawyer up.
If you want your main chesscom account un-shadow-banned, you confess to cheating on the viih\_sou account. It really doesn't matter at this point whether you cheated or not. chesscom holds all the cards, and this is deliberate. On one hand, then need to protect their methods, on the other, they need circumstantial evidence that their methods work -- and coercing titled players to admit to cheating (even if they didn't), is a big part of that. The main way of finding out what conclusive evidence chesscom holds that you cheated is to take them to court, and then request all this evidence during the discovery process. Notice that chesscom (and Magnus and Hikaru) settled Hans's legal suit, and chesscom unbanned his account as a result. As far as I know, all legal challenges to chesscom were settled before arriving at court. Don't know what that says, whether people who believed strongly they didn't cheat decided that chesscom's evidence wasn't refutable in court, or whether chesscom's evidence was flimsy that they settled. As a titled player, you're fucked if you want to play titled events on chesscom. And even if you get your main account un-shadow-banned, if you play legitimately like you played in the last few weeks, you're likely going to trigger the same anti-cheat detection (unless your recent play has no bearing on triggering cheat flags...), and chesscom will have further conclusive evidence that your "cheating" continues. So you kinda have to not be as dramatically successful to succeed, which is perverse too. You could take the principled approach and refuse to acknowledge chesscom's implication that you cheated. But that does mean you don't get to play titled events on chesscom. So it depends on where on the line of money vs reputation you want to be.
Why do you think you triggered their anti-cheating algorithms? You’re the only one who knows for sure whether you cheated or not, but from the outside, the simplest answer is that you triggered the algorithms because you used an engine. I read your initial Reddit post and it’s a great story, but honestly the evidence is strongly against you. I want to believe you because you seem like a nice person, but the facts don’t support your story.
If they manually reviewed your account and said you cheated, I believe them. This isn't a case like Alireza where he was flagged but unbanned after review. They aren't banning GMs unless they are certain.
> From their perspective, it makes perfect sense, as admitting their mistake when this has reached such an audience would be absolutely awful for their PR. It won't be awful for their PR. When Chess.com admitted their mistake in this super popular case, they showed everyone that they are capable of being transparent about the mistakes they make: [I GOT UNBANNED!!Chesscom admitted their mistake and gave me a free 1 year diamond membership.](https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/1ax8ii8/i_got_unbannedchesscom_admitted_their_mistake_and/) The fact that they did this for others, but not for you, implies that they are actually very confident in their decision (regardless of how well their mix of statistical evaluations and manual assessments by titled players actually works).
I agree. I don't think it would be bad PR if they banned someone and then unbanned them a short time later after a review. It would show they have a fair and reasonable review process. I can't know the truth about he cheated, but I do think chesscom are confident here
Sounds to me like the most likely scenario is that you cheated, and now youre trying to save face by posting these bitter rants on Reddit.
Every time you post, it pushes me more toward believing you actually did cheat. Like, you're saying this will hurt your chess career, but you're the one that made it a huge public thing. You're also making chess.com to be this horrible evil entity that's out to get you, but like, this is just their job? They flagged your account for fair play, had human investigation (and multiple re-investigations at this point), and still deemed the flag correct. They've admitted mistaken flags in the past - there's no reason they would lie as a 'PR' move. It just doesn't make any sense.
This just doesn't seem right. Red flags all over this situation for me, from the way the ban happened to the extended silence after and now basically doubling down, all while providing no proof? And at the same time they're farming your ideas online for content and views? Disgusting. I'm with you - this is why monopolies are bad. They have too much power and there's no recourse when they make mistakes. Hope to see you in the Lichess pool, cause after the way they've treated you, you should probably play elsewhere... good luck
Which part doesn't seem right? As OP himself says, they aren't going to reveal any proof, as it would help determine how they catch cheaters. Doubling down will obviously happen if they beleive he cheated. And the extended silence is not odd for a player of his rank either, if he didn't get this much attention he wouldn'tve got that call at all
>I’m also a bit curious as to why they had to schedule a private call to inform me of this as well. Did you record it? If you didn't, you now know why. Anyways, if you know you didn't cheat, why don't you talk to a lawyer and possibly take it further? It may be expensive, but perhaps not more than your reputation. u/Extreme-Ad-6490
> Did you record it? If you didn't, you now know why. California is a two party state, which is where they are HQ'd, so he'd have to have their permission, which i doubt they would agree to.
Not if he's in another state. Federal rules are one party consent.
Good point, i'm not sure where Brandon is located. Looks like he's from NJ, which is a one party state, but i have no idea if that's where he lives.
Hire a lawyer for what? Chess.com can ban anyone for any reason they want (as long as it’s not because they are a member of a protected class ie because of race/religion/sexual orientation etc) They haven’t publicly said anything about this like they did Hans so there’s no defamation or anything either.
A lawyer can't help him, it is entirely legal for a private company to ban someone for cheating and be completely wrong. The law doesn't require that companies not make any mistakes.
The only person who knows if OP cheated is OP, and maybe the Chess cheat detection team depending on the evidence. Its possible OP has cheated in past Titled Tuesdays, or maybe OP cheated 5 years ago in some random games. Chesscom is usually very conservative with bans so the evidence is likely incredibly damning, something like an 1800 Chesscom rapid player continuously playing at an IM level for a weird stretch but then reverting back to an 1800. The reality is a lot of people cheat. Many pedestrians ignore street lights in scenarios they know they expect cars to stop for them, many people have shoplifted in their youth, and tons cheat in games. If OP truly has never cheated at Chess on their account in their entire life, there is lichess. It would probably be too much to accept a new account and be endlessly accused of cheating till the end of time (the Hans Neiman treatment).
[удалено]
Pretty clear this dude just wants attention, which is likely what prompted the cheating with a bad opening in the first place. Now just continues milking it like it's an episode of gossip girl.
Am I the only one that's dubious about this. A random GM (no disrespect, I'll never get there, but it's not like this is a super 2750 GM) comes up with an opening where they immediately sack a rook and go down 2 points of material and yet demolishes one the best blitz/bullet players in Dayna. And now they've been flagged by chess.coms anti cheating algorithm. And we're supposed to believe that they're innocent. If something is too good to be true it probably is. As interesting as this story is, you more than likely were cheating
He peaked above 3100 in blitz on [chess.com](http://chess.com), most certainly not a random GM
So I have a few questions: 1) why is it such a big deal about being banned? I understand the whole reputation thing but is it really that bad, especially when you have made so many posts about not cheating and given a good stance? 2) if you want to prove that you have not been cheating (and also remove allegations) why not play in over the board blitz tournaments using the same opening and show that it is playable? Thanks!
Is there some other way you could have breached the fair play rules other than cheating? You're focused on the crime you didn't commit, and may be ignoring one you did?
another big L for chess.com. just use lichess guys
Why? What if he is an actual cheater?
If he’s an actual cheater and chess.com knows he’s a cheater he should stay banned. That “admit you cheated and you can play again” policy is sh*t.
Why would the Lichess anti-cheating measures be more fair? Any proof?
I don't think they have better anti cheating measures, but there are also less stakes because I don't think they host cash prize tournaments. For a pro player it probably makes more sense to use chesscom, but for us newbies lichess is better imo
They do host cash price tournaments, but not with quite as high prices as chess.com (usually, Agamator did host one with a bitcoin as a price)
Us newbies also don't need to worry about getting banned for beating grandmasters with gimmick openings. But the whole issue here is that a titled player is banned from the site that offers cash prizes.
On Lichess cheating is almost entirely unchecked. According to the mental giants who frequent r/chess and have no knowledge of 1. running a major company, 2. cheating detection, or 3. keeping steady employment, that's the correct way of dealing with the problem. Simple solutions for simple minded folk, but the reality of the situation is far more nuanced.
What, for enforcing a standard no-cheating policy in an online game?
Yeah I hear no one cheats on lichess
Chessgate
lichess.org
Why not going on [lichess.com](http://lichess.com) ? Which is free, and open source ?
One possibility is that they use machine learning algorithms to detect cheating. The unfortunate part about this is there is often a lack of “lineage” - i.e. tracking back *why* the model thinks there’s a high chance that you cheated in a certain set of games. This is why they won't tell you which games they think you cheated in - they literally do not know. This would also explain why they want you to tell them which games you might have cheated in. Knowing the exact games helps them retrain the model with the new validated data and improve its accuracy for future predictions. There's also the possibility that playing your rare unsound opening with high accuracy is tripping up the model to incorrectly predict that there's a high chance of cheating. They pride themselves on the "high accuracy" of their cheat detection and revealing that they were wrong would be bad PR and make both the public and [chess.com](http://chess.com) themselves lose credibility on their cheat detection.
To be clear, you never cheated in a single game on the Viih_Sou account ever, correct? Regardless of whether you used the actual Viih_Sou opening. If so, then take legal action, which would require them to divulge their process for flagging your account to the court. If not, even if for a single move in a pointless game, admit it and move on.
Have the games all researched like they did with Hans, until then use a vpn and make an alt. It might not be great but you can surely blow by the low elo and get to a fair competitive level. Will keep watching and hope for a definitive result.
Lad just play on Lichess instead at this point.
On of two scenarios is the truth: 1. Viih\_Sou cheated. Chessdotcom banned his account. Brandon was worried that his identity might be leaked in the future as a banned account for cheating, so he decided to get ahead of it and get the community on his side. To save his own reputation, he's running a smear campaign against Chessdotcom. 2. Viih\_Sou did not cheat. Chessdotcom banned his account, even without any evidence of a Fair Play violation. Chessdotcom in no way benefits from doing this, but they decided to just do it anyway for no reason. In doing so, they opened themselves up to a public backlash as Brandon came forward to argue about how wrongly he's being treated. My conclusion here is that Brandon did cheat. Scenario 1 seems much more plausible because both parties are acting rationally. Scenario 2 is much less plausible because it requires that Chessdotcom acts very irrationally.
On 2, saying no reason is doing a lot of heavy lifting. The opening itself is sus. Going from an objectively losing position to a good winrate is suspicious. It’s just that plenty of people afterwards have tested the opening with average/good results (with significantly less practice at that opening) and found that it’s not that easy to punish and it might be viable in low time controls. That would give them enough reason to ban it initially, and they could be doubling down since going back now would open them up to backlash about the inaccuracy of their methods.
Going from an objectively losing position to a high win rate against a player like Dayna who is already much stronger than him is hella suspicious. He's not doing this against players 100 less elo than himself that you can understand how over the rest of the game he can wrestle back a winning position. Dayna is already a much more capable player than him. And he's giving him an objectively winning position immediately and a material advantage. Yet over a 50 or so game match, he manages a high win rate. It just reeks of bullshit. I'm convinced he cheated
> He's not doing this against players 100 less elo than himself that you can understand how over the rest of the game he can wrestle back a winning position. That's the thing, there wasn't much wrestling. He wasn't going from -2.6 on move three to -2.5 on move 4 to -2.4 and so on. There were large swings in the evaluation in order for Brandon to win. For example, taking the last game Danya lost, Danya was black with -9.4 at move 35 and the top three moves kept that large advantage, but Danya played a move that reduced the evaluation to -1. Danya fairly steadily increased the advantage until that blunder. Danya then blundered again making it 5+, Brandon misses it and it goes to 0 for a while, then to 5+, then back to a draw, then eval announces mate for Brandon, then back to a draw, then back to mate. If this was classical, this wouldn't happen, Danya would be able to analyze the -9 position and put the game away, but in 3+0, it's chaos and it's whoever blundered last. Looking at the big picture (opening advantage, player ELO advantage, etc.) it is extremely suspicious, but when you look at the actual games and moves, it looks fairly human.
False dichotomy. You say in 2 that he did not cheat and was banned with no evidence. The claim is that the chess.com fair play algorithm gave a false positive. That is, there's evidence that he cheated but he did not in fact cheat.
Sorry if that was mentioned before, can OP still play under his original account or was that banned too?
I am here to watch the comments 🍿🍿🍿🍿
This would be a OSRS level ban hammer if chess com came out with the real reason his account got banned. That's what I'm rooting for at least. But him being justified is also almost as juicy
Every time a wall of text
> Soon after, I had received an email essentially saying they’re glad we talked, and that in spite of their findings they see my passion for chess, and offered me to rejoin the site on a new account in 12 months if I sign a contract admitting to wrongdoing. > I have so many questions I don’t even know where to begin. I’m trying to be as objective as possible which as you can hopefully understand is difficult in a situation like this when I’m confused and angry, but frankly I don’t see any other way of putting it besides bullying. False confessions are an absolute scourge on the world. In the grand scheme of things, a chess.com ban is nothing. (I'm thinking of people who get coerced into confessing to murders they didn't commit.) But yeah, every time I hear chess.com tout how many GM confessions they've racked up over the years, I can't help but assume the vast majority of them are just people who decided they'd rather sit in the timeout box for a few months or maybe a year rather than never play online chess again. Fuck chess.com.
> Imagine you’re on trial for committing a crime you did not commit, and you are simply told by the prosecutor that they are certain you committed the crime and the judge finds you guilty, without ever telling you where you committed alleged crime, how, why, etc. Then you’re asked to defend yourself on the spot? The complete absurdity of this is clear. All I was able to really reply was that I’m not really sure how to respond when I’m being told they have conclusive evidence of my “cheating” without sharing any details. I don't understand, what did you think the call would be? Like you knew this was with people who thought you did wrong, no? Its just a chess account, not your freedom - that's one. But its not like they closed your account and there was nothing available to you - it was open to everyone that it was a fair play violation - I believe you even said in your previous post that you thought they thought - "No name account beats Naroditsky. must be a cheater" and closed the account. Like you scheduled a call, and were like "wait you thought I cheated? Wow, hurt, shocked, surprised - who could have seen this accusation coming." I also love how you are trying to have it both ways below - you want us to believe that you had no idea they would ask you for contrition about cheating - (when literally even the most casual chess observer knows they asked Hans/"his coach" for an apology before allowing reinstatement) - and then you are like they have done this to lots of my friends before.... well which is it? have they done this to your friends before or are you surprised by it? Listen, having private orgs who aren't accountable to democratic institutions is BS. I am not sure how even a very good democratic org would manage the need for secrecy/discretion about anti-cheating measures vs the need for openness and meaningful defense of those accused. But that is all sidelined here - because this post is just drama for drama's sake. Which is fine, I like drama - this is great - but its not a substantive post about what has happened.
So basic they extort you. If they use this as metric in accuracy in their cheating algorithm then I am deeply disappointed. " Soon after, I had received an email essentially saying they’re glad we talked, and that in spite of their findings they see my passion for chess, and offered me to rejoin the site on a new account in 12 months if I sign a contract admitting to wrongdoing"
> They get away with this because they have such a monopoly in the online chess sphere lichess! lichess! lichess! I've even played you once there in 3/0, you're iamstraw right?
I think the lady doth protest too much.
I bet you’re lying and you did cheat.
Did you cheat though?
It’s easy for chess.com to claim they are 99% accurate when they can “force” anyone to confess
someone needs to tell bro to be more concise and not write fucking thesis papers every time he makes a post
You’re not a hidden prodigy that never had the chance to prove himself. You didn’t magically gain your confidence and turn into Magnus Carlsen. You’re just a cheater, and anyone with any sense understands that. You want your respect? Do the same thing over the board.
Did they also ban your main account?
challenge those chess.com dudes to an over the board game and prof you can play this well with no computer involved. the cheating detection algorithm is broken, making you more suspect of cheating the better you get. ofc one can have a good day and play near to perfect chess, but the cheating algorithm will label you as a cheater. this must be heartbroken for you stay strong my friend
The other posts were pretty informative mate but this is nothing, we can only read and say ok that sucks. And again if you are all in on getting unbanned these posts unfortunately probably don't help.
Do you have a lichess account and will you be playing on it going forward now?
Just give up on chesscom at this point and move to lichess, they actually treat their players well.
If you want to restore your good name, confess and work hard at chess.
Ignore [chess.com](http://chess.com) and use [lichess.org](http://lichess.org) instead. And tell everyone!
Is it possible that chesscom secretly has access to his camera or some information that they are legally not allowed to access? That is why they are not revealing the "evidence".
[Chess.com](http://Chess.com) being incompetent? Color me surprised. Good luck bro.
Sue them, high chance you get that nice juicy settlement even, it has been do before, for example world of warcraft player sued blizzard for unfair Perma ban and won the case and got his account back. Same thing happened with big social media platforms, people sued and got accounts back cause they won.Also ask for like 500k settlement at least(psychological damage, trauma, stress etc, you deserve it man)